The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View (opens in new tab)

So I've been studying Unger for about four years now through my political activism. He is verbose in his language but once you get used to it you can see his brilliance.

His core arguments on the KE are as follows:

- It is creating a schism in the American workforce, and those on the outside lack access to the necessary educational institutions to ever catch up.

- Our IP laws are stagnating our economic development by keeping it isolated to a handful of companies in each industry vertical. Compared to our past this prevents transitioning to an entirely new mode of production. Compare that to history - if you wanted to open a loom factory during the industrial rev. you had access to the loom tech. Not the case today. There's also no shortcut like there was in the past. E.g. Put a farmer in a factory assembly line is NBD. Put a plant worker behind a laptop and ask him to write a script? Not happening.

--- Platform companies only have their dominion because an IP loophole states the individual's data is not their property. We make our data our property and companies like FB/Google struggle to retain their power.

- It's a form of work that utilizes the greatest human power, imagination.

- Under the right political structures this form of work ushers in a new human era. Under the current it stagnates our potential.

Happy to answer specifics if anyone has any questions about his work/perspective.

This is written in the same convoluted style as a New York Review of Books literature review; it's confusing and seems to be more about proving the author's intelligence than making a point. When the article (finally) comes to the point, the author overstates its significance. He says that Romer was wrong, but then admits Romer was mostly correct, with a few addenda which Romer may have thought too obvious to bother with.

Expansionary monetary policy has been fueling a controlled economic decline by concentrating wealth and disguising it as growth.

This has led to extreme inconsistencies in the perceived value of money which has become completely detached from productivity or real value.

Media echo chambers are failing to hide these inconsistencies though they did a much better job at insulating the elite from the ideas of the masses than the other way round.

The masses perceive the modern economy and society as an incoherent fictions. In their struggle to make sense of this incoherence, the masses assume that the elites are intentionally conspiring against them. The masses don't understand that the elites are simply delusional.

Unlike the masses, the elites don't feel any disconnect between their experienced reality and mainstream social narratives. The problems in our society are so massive and so obvious that the masses cannot imagine that the elites could possibly not notice them; so they think that the elites must be pretending, they must be conspiring.

There is no conspiracy by the elite. It's just plain old delusion backed self-serving optimism bounced around within echo chambers.

I gave up wading through all that prose....

A few economic ideas that come to mind which I think are not reflected by how our economy works (and fails to work):

If you think of the raw unrecovered resources of Earth, our solar system, and beyond, as an inheritance that humans have received without any merit of our own, then in principle it would seem that an economic system could benefit all of us without any redistribution taking place.

For instance, paying everyone equally from auction proceeds of new resource rights.

Similarly with intellectual property, incentives to innovate are both useful and often earned. But hard intellectual property laws are also harmful in blocking (even if temporarily) directions that others may have been likely to also benefit from.

A fix might be to assign a small percentage of revenue or profits on ideas protected by IP to a similar equally dispersed fund.

That funding would reflect the cost of society to temporarily give up the rights of others to independently discover and monetize protected innovations, and the cost of providing that protection.

The idea that the human race inherits open ended physical and intellectual terrain, but that inheritance is unequally divided, seems tragic.

I am not in any way overlooking the efforts made to uncover ideas or utilize new resources, or the need for those that do that work to benefit directly from that work.

US Economy in a nutshell:

1.) Pass NAFTA and a series of laws in the 90s to:

Ship out all jobs that can be shipped out, import cheaper workers that can under cut wages.

2.) Make the argument that the above makes it so that Americans can "retrain" for new jobs. This never happens and has never been proven to happen.

3.) Watch as the average American effective wage plummets, use financial engineering to pump up stocks and the housing markets.

Economic crashes keep occurring as the financial engineering to generate mass wealth destroys the financial health of our companies and families.

4.) Print money to save the country from entering economic depression while the capitalists and people benefitting from the outsourcing of labor become wealthy beyond all belief.

5.) Buy cheap TVs, because thats all we got.

This seems quite out of touch with reality as far as I can tell. It is possible to see Facebook in his analysis, but what about the latest generation of ultrasound medical devices? Having done a lot of release engineering and now "devops" I have found that in reality the essential work of attending logs, understanding changes and configuration management, composing and executing basic scripts, is actually well within reach of ordinary people and employees with hardly any relevant training often end up handling daily tasks in technology development. One of the confounding factors is that tech companies tend to pick up ordinary people from the tech developer dominated local areas where they operate, but the trend toward remote work might have an effect on that.